Group 4- Wandr Design

Design Process:

For our design process we started out with quite a few ideas. At first for our world we had initially started with a world with “immortal” bodies that allowed people to upload their minds to a computer. After our first pitch we decided that it might be better to go with an easier world to design for so we went back to the drawing board. Julius brought up an anime that he had seen and we decided to loosely base our world off of it.

We decided to go with a world that the prime force behind legal enforcement is the concept of pre-crime. Pre-crime is the tendency to focus on crimes that haven’t been committed yet and provide preventive measures. A system of technology has evolved that can give people somatic scans and tell them a number that represents how likely they are to commit a crime. These somatic scanners are located every couple of blocks. Legal enforcement has come to evolve around this system. Legal enforcers base their actions on these scanners. There are four different thresholds these numbers can fall under: normal, keep watch, detainable, executable.

For our actual system we just brainstormed pitching around different ideas to one another. Once we had a couple of ideas like the classic mobile application, a t-shirt to lower your levels, drugs to help reduce the threat levels of the user and even wristbands to tell you where to go for our evation option. We actually did a bit of research on both our world and existing systems for example we looked into already occurrences of pre-crime and other map location services similar to both google maps and Waze(the mobile app). Eventually we decided to go with the simple app because we decided that in our world that apps are just as prevalent as they are today. After discussing with the initial critiquers who gave us very useful feedback we decided to stick with our app idea even though they did say some of our other ideas were also viable.

Later into development we decided to switch it to just a web application due to the team’s skills in programming and our time constraints found it easier to implement for our prototype. This would also make it more versatile for users since they can access it with any online capable device. This change doesn’t really make much of a difference to the actual prototype since they will both be pretty equivalent in design and functionality.

Also during our design process we were able to design up a logo for our app that started out as a weird looking W made up of security cameras but we eventually came up with this design below:

Prototype:

Like described in the design process we decided to implement a web based app for our prototype. We decided to mostly base it off of how google maps works but we needed to account for the addition of security cameras. An early mockup of our prototype can be seen below:

We decided to reduce our prototype to just a small subsection of Blacksburg since that is the only place we will be able to evaluate it anyway. The actual design itself is pretty simple and works just like any destination application where you select you destination and it takes you from your current location to the destination with two exceptions one that it avoids cameras to help you avoid being scanned from the scanners in our world and two it also has the capability to take you to the nearest “safe zone” that will allow you to cool-off until you are ready to move safely again. This is highlighted in both our storyboard and concept video.

Video:

For our video we decided to base it off of our two storyboards shown below:

We decided this because we thought it was the best example of how our system works and shows the true purpose of the app itself. The script itself is very simple because we don’t have any words spoken but the general breakdown of the video is follows:

Scene of couple arguing and breaking up causing one of them to leave both frustrated and stressed thus increasing their threat levels in the world. Them then realizing this and remembering that they want to avoid being scanned and being detained during an already stressful situation. They then pull up the app to find the nearest “safe zone” and follow the given directions to the “safe zone” to allow them to cool off enough to be able to move through scanners and passing the safe limit on the scanners. The video itself is unable to be uploaded entirely so here are some screenshots of it:

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Evaluation:

For our evaluation plan it is pretty simple, we will just have people use our prototype through field testing using the local area of Blacksburg and then ask them very simple qualitative questions to get feedback on things including: ease of use, layout, design, etc. We have yet to get all of the data we want but will finish the evaluation soon.